Our Mission

The mission of COMFOCUS is to advance the European food consumer science community beyond its current level of fragmentation that is preventing it from being the harmonised data-rich science it could be in support of European healthy food choice public policies and private strategies. COMFOCUS will (re-) organize the food consumer science community to become more united, harmonised and scientifically advanced and to work according to FAIR and RRI principles.

Our achievements so far:

• A broad team of food consumer science experts, united within the COMFOCUS consortium, have collectively been involved in working towards harmonisation of measures and protocols, make selections of most relevant measures to prioritise in harmonisation, and to come up with agreed upon best practices;

• A new network of young career researchers has been established by providing COMFOCUS fellows access to research infrastructures that are not available and (fully) accessible in their home institutes;

• Education and competence building has been achieved through 67 Open Call-2 projects in which COMFOCUS fellows have worked intensively together with COMFOCUS more senior/ experienced experts;

• Various dissemination and training activities have been organised to facilitate COMFOCUS Community building and way of working, including the biweekly consortium seminar series; COMFOCUS has developed a first draft of its own ontology. The COMFOCUS ontology is presented on different conferences and workshops and involved with other ontology networks to ensure the link to existing ontologies (e.g. FoodOn);

• First version of the COMFOCUS Knowledge Platform has been launched. The platform provides tools and services to facilitate the new way of working. The platform includes a discussion platform, library and toolbox.

COMFOCUS at the Integrated Food Ontology Workshop in Enschede, the Netherlands.

On July 15, 2024, at the IFOW 2024 Integrated Food Ontology Workshop held in Enschede, Netherlands, Joep Tummers presented insights from the COMFOCUS Project. This presentation was part of the "Farm to Fork Food System Representation”. In the presentation we focused on the ontology created in the COMFOCUS project for food consumer science. The workshop, part of the Formal Ontologies in Information Systems (FOIS) conference, brought together leading experts on ontologies to explore innovative approaches on ontologies, including the role of AI and Large Language Models in enhancing food data systems.

The COMFOCUS ontology was met with great enthusiasm, and valuable feedback was received from the audience to elevate the project to a higher level. This positive reception underscores the project's potential impact on advancing food consumer science ontology.

 

Food Convergence Innovation (FCI) Design and Capacity Building Workshop took place on July 24th, 2024

Workshop “Sharing best practices among food consumer science experts” took place in Nitra, Slovakia on May 16th 

The second COMFOCUS roundtable discussion with food consumer science experts in Slovakia took place to see how the field of food consumer science can overcome the challenges in harmonising approaches to research and to sharing data once it has served its primary purpose.

These roundtable discussions were organised to receive feedback on COMFOCUS project’s philosophy and activities from food consumer science experts working at universities, research institutes and private sector. The approach adopted in COMFOCUS community to progress towards more harmonised measures and protocols in food consumer science was discussed at the pragmatic level of what it implies in relation to carrying out consumer research. The discussions were related to current practices we have, what are the benefits and disadvantages in harmonised approaches and data sharing, and how we need to change current practices if we move towards more open science and making datasets reusable by sharing them.

The roundtable discussions were organised during the second and third year of the project when the harmonised measures and protocols were finalised and made available to participants in the COMFOCUS knowledge platform as basis and preparation materials for the roundtable discussions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The questions raised during the last roundtable were:
  • How can we define and update what are best practices for collection, sharing and storing of data?
  • If we harmonise, how to benefit and how to avoid the pitfalls of harmonisation?
  • How to encourage participation and collaboration?

Read more information about the event here.